In this latest post to his blog Justin Carmony looks at a system he created to hook his Nagios notifications into the Twilio web service and have it notify him via SMS with something was wrong.

In the past I would just use my iPhone's email-to-txt email address. However, when I received the txt message, it wasn't formated very pretty, and it would have a different "From Number." So if we had a crazy day, I would have 20-30 message threads in my iPhone all about Nagios. [...] What I like out this setup is with Twilio, I can buy a phone number for $1 a month. So all my notifications come through the same number.

He's included the PHP code he uses to send the notifications (using the Twillo library) and the Nagios commands he configured to send the notifications to that script via the command line.

Continuing on with his previous investigations into microframworks and what it takes to create them, Gonzalo Ayuso has posted his second part of the series - a look at working on the command line.

In my last post we spoke about building a small microframework with PHP. The main goal of this kind of framework was to be able to map urls to plain PHP classes and become those classes easily testeable with PHPUnit. Now we're going to take a step forward. [...] It's pretty straightforward to create a command line interface (CLI) for our microframework.

He shows how to use the getopt function and the $GLOBALS superglobal to pull in arguments given to the command line script. He hooks this into the framework and makes it possible to define the controller and action to execute (with a few examples to show it in action). You can find this updated code on his github account.

In this new post Maarten Balliauw looks at a "hidden gem" in the Windows Azure SDK for PHP - the ability to create scripts to work with command-line scripts - the Microsoft_Console_Command class.

Usually when creating a command line script you would parse $_SERVER['argv'], validate values and check whether required switches are available or not. With the Microsoft_Console_Command class from the Windows Azure SDK for PHP, you can ease up this task. Let's compare writing a simple "hello" command.

He compares the two sides of making a PHP command-line script: the "ugly way" using normal PHP code and $_SERVER['argv'] and the "easy way" using the Microsoft_Console_Command class that uses a class to define the functionality. There's also methods to grab specific arguments, pull from STDIN and get environment variables.

Tim Lytle has written up a new tutorial for the Zend Developer Zone talking about OAuth and making one of the more difficult parts - getting an access token - a bit simpler using a command-line application.

OAuth is great - there's no need to save users' passwords, it's - in theory - a consistent way to interact with other services, and it's hopefully something that your users are familiar and comfortable using. But if you're not just interacting with your users' accounts - for example, your application uses a single account on a service to broadcast messages, or analyze data - getting or renewing the access token can be painful.

He illustrates the problem with an example connecting to Twitter and even points out a script that makes bridging this gap simpler. Unfortunately, it's not exactly what he needed, so he reworked the idea with a call to the Twitter API using a Zend_Oauth_Consumer and a custom callback. The script is then set up with some command line options for inputting the key and secret information. Also included is functionality letting you define a configuration file. You can see the final result here on github.

On JavaWorld they've posted a look at command-line PHP support including a few sample scripts to get you started:

When I decided to give PHP a closer look, I wondered if PHP was a browser-only technology or if it could be used for command line scripting. It turns out that one can write operating system level scripts with PHP as discussed in online resources such as Command Line Scripting in PHP, Command Line PHP on Microsoft Windows, and Executing PHP files. In this blog post, I look at PHP command line scripting at an introductory level.

He talks about some of the basics - setting up a "Hello World" script to be run as PHP (and running it) as well as adding in the ability to take command-line arguments. He shows how to get environment information and run other command calls through the PHP script. He also points out the handy php_sapi_name method that can be used to detect whether or not the script is running on the command line.

In a recent post to his blog Maarten Balliauw (the third part of a series) looks at how you can use Azure to scale your PHP-based application dynamically using the latest version of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP. His example creates a simple shell script that can scale up or down your instances with one call.

One of the key ideas behind cloud computing is the concept of scaling.Talking to customers and cloud enthusiasts, many people seem to be unaware about the fact that there is great opportunity in scaling, even for small applications.

Using the SDK, he shows how to create the command-line tool buy craeting a management client and setting up the command line parameters to give to the setInstanceCountBySlot() method. This gives you the ability to spawn off as many new "slots" (instances) as you might need quickly and easily.

In a new post to his blog Stuart Herbert has introduced phix, a packaging tools that can be used to manage and install different components in a framework-agnostic sort of way.

phix is a small command-line tool for PHP applications. I created it to fix (pun intended) the problem of how to easily automate the tasks involved in creating and (especially) maintaining components. These tasks aren't built into phix; they are commands that ship with the phix distribution. You can create your own commands to run inside phix too, and it's easy to do so

The phix tool (easily installed from PEAR) lets you either use built-in commands or custom ones to manage libraries with a few different kinds of commands - current status, initialize a library, upgrade a library and manage the full web application. As of the time of this post, the current version is phix-0.10.4.

Phil Sturgeon has put together a screencast showing off a few of the features of the Fuel PHP framework like migrations, tasks and the console the Oil tool provides.

In this video I'm going to be demonstrating migrations which I touched on in the last video but I felt I should go into them in more depth. Migrations [...] are essentially a way to stage changes for your database in a way that means the changes can be independent from the schema as a whole.

He walks you through the creation of a migration with the help of the Oil command line tool. The generated classes include "up" and "down" methods for the creation and rollback of your changes. He shows the process to create a simple task and how to use the built-in console to interactively work with the framework. You can find out more about Fuel on the Fuel documentation section of the project's site.

Sam Holman has written up a new post on the Label Media blog today about installing Sphinx and PECL/sphinx on a Mac OS X system. No sample code is provided, but this will definitely help with the setup.

I've got a fairly vanilla install of Snow Leopard (10.6) and use the default installations of PHP, MySQL, Apache, et al. Installing the Sphinx open source search engine and the PECL extension wasn't too much of a pain, but would have been easier had i had the following notes to hand.

His first try was with Macports, but dependency issues shot that down quickly. Instead he opted for the more conventional path of: download the binaries of Sphinx and using the "pecl" command line too to install the PECL module. All that's left is adding the line to load the share object (sphinx.so) into the php.ini's config. You can find out more about the PECL sphinx package here

New on PHPBuilder.com today there's a tutorial from Jason Gilmore about running Zend Framework-based applications from the command line in a more hard-coded way than using Zend_Tool.

I regularly use an alternative application of PHP and I'm quite surprised that this capability remains relatively unknown. I'm referring to the ability to run PHP scripts from the command line using its command line interpreter (CLI). Even though it's been possible since the PHP 4.3.0 release, you may be completely unaware of this CLI usage unless you employ great tools such as PHPDoc, Phing, or PHPUnit. Running PHP scripts with CLI allows you to leverage your PHP language skills whenever you need to run scripts from the shell.

He talks about what the CLI functionality of PHP is and what it has to offer the developer. He then creates a few sample scripts so you can get a feel for how to write and run simple PHP CLI applications. Building on these examples, he creates a Zend Framework-based script that loads in the bootstrap, grabs configuration values and makes a connection to the Amazon Web Services.